September 11, 2018
Luck, Lit, & Gutter Spouts
I was twenty-three years old when I won the Hopwood Award for Poetry. A recent college grad, I lived in a leaky apartment that I’d furnished with lawn furniture and […]
September 26, 2016
Ballads of Bottles and Blades
The ballad is a form that can easily sound antiquated and sing-song on the page. This is, of course, because “sing-song” isn’t a negative descriptor when describing actual song, and […]
July 30, 2015
Teach This (Part V)
[Continued from earlier posts on teaching poetry] Robert Hayden’s “Night, Death, Mississippi” is a poem that horrifies me. Each time I encounter the domestic scene and colloquial voice, it feels like […]
June 30, 2015
Teach This (Part IV)
[Continued from yesterday’s post on teaching Robert Hayden’s “The Ballad of Nat Turner.”] It might seem strange to teach the same poem twice in a single semester (particularly two weeks […]
June 29, 2015
Teach This (Part III)
Building off of my posts from June 17 and June 18, today I’m thinking about why I love teaching Robert Hayden’s “The Ballad of Nat Turner” and “Night, Death, Mississippi” so much. For […]
June 18, 2015
Teach This (Part II)
Yesterday afternoon, I hit “Publish” on a blog post reflecting on widely anthologized and widely taught poems. My intention was not to criticize those poems (there are many good reasons […]
June 17, 2015
Teach This, Not That!
I don’t mean that, of course. Whatever “this” and “that” are, I probably believe in teaching both of them. (This post’s title is really just a silly tongue-firmly-in-cheek reference to a […]